Head First & Laughing

Nothing but originality and cool guy emoji.

[my-urdu-soul]

by Akhil Katyal

[typodescript]

[text ID: In the Urdu Class

I confuse my be with pe.

He asks me to write 'water', and I write 'you'.

Who knew they'd make them so close,

Aab (آب) and Aap (آپ).

Both difficult to hold on to. end ID]

[lifeinpoetry]

& I’m just one body or set of rules I break in a heartbeat for a feeling of thrill wreckless wrecklessam I another long long trick of existencestill burning

like a halogen -lit hot plate I leave on after the fire burns an entire world& mass burial is the only possible memorytaken & annulled

— Rosebud Ben-Oni, from “Poet Wrestling With Reverse {re-Verse} String Theory,” If This Is the Age We End Discovery

[bostonpoetryslam]

“Some mornings when I wake I think I can unthink my body, to make it salt or sand— my head the top chamber of a halved hourglass spilling into the wind, but I’m trying not to violence myself as a way to protect”

— Emilia Phillips, “The First Boy I Thought I Loved Was in a Band Called Romanticide,” published in The Adroit Journal

[blossomfully]

Sue Zhao

[bostonpoetryslam]

via the Poetry Foundation

[bostonpoetryslam]

“Sometimes I feel washed up as paper. You’re three years away. But then I dance down Graham and the trees are the color of champagne and I remember— There are things I like about heartbreak, too, how it needs a good soundtrack. The way I catch a man’s gaze on the L and don’t look away first. Losing something is just revising it. After this love there will be more love.”

— Hala Alyan, “Object Permanence,” via the Academy of American Poets

[lifeinpoetry]

And then, when you collapse, sprawled out like a starfish, you will love

with your whole body. You will bleed the earth

a sky.

— from Chorus, eds. Saul Williams, Dufflyn Lammers & Aja Monet

[bostonpoetryslam]

“i wasn’t there when the ICE agents raided my brother’s work. i only saw the news stories, and what hurt most immediately was thinking about him on the ground, about his hands behind his head. what hurt most was thinking about the chaos— the running through the rocks and the dust and cement. twenty-eight men, one of them my brother, [GOVELIN ARREOLA MORALES], and if i write his name down—right here— spell it right in all this English, [GOVELIN ARREOLA MORALES] and if someone reads this [GOVELIN ARREOLA MORALES], isn’t he documented? aren’t these his papers?”

— Jesús I. Valles, “Phone Call: A Shitty Play in One Act,” from The BreakBeat Poets Vol. 4: LatiNext

[lifeinpoetry]

i killed a plant once because i gave it too much water. lord, i worry that love is violence.

— José Olivarez, from “Getting Ready to Say I Love You to My Dad, It Rains,” Citizen Illegal

[bostonpoetryslam]

Naima Yael Tokunow, “Menu,” from Shadow Black

[frogandtoadpdf]

thinking about that ilya kaminsky poem that’s like i was / in my bed, around my bed america / was falling: invisible house by invisible house by invisible house

[frogandtoadpdf]

we lived happily during the war - ilya kaminsky

[boggirls]

frank ocean’s foreword for a24’s moonlight book…. 🥺

[vegaofthelyre]

The Sciences Sing a Lullaby by Albert Goldbarth

[sunrisesongs]

“Substitute for the Still God” published in The Anatomy of Desire: The Anthology of Distance.

Ebook: payhip.com/b/bYn2

Print copy: bit.ly/2F0We5E

[lifeinpoetry]

There are unmistakable signs of trouble, but we have days and days still. Let’s be giddy, maybe.

Time lights a little fire. We are animal hungry down to our intricate bones.

— Deborah Landau, from Soft Targets

[lizstiel]

— Karese Burrows, “Crush”, This Is How We Lost Each Other

[songsforgorgons]

“What Kind of Times Are These” by Adrienne Rich, from Dark Fields of the Republic (1995).